IRSH 51 (2006), pp. 189216 DOI: 10.

1017/S0020859006002422
# 2006 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Segmentation in the Pre-Industrial Labour Market:

Womens Work in the Dutch Textile Industry,
15811810

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

Summary: This article analyses womens work in the Dutch textile industry in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the framework of dual (or segmented)
labour market theory. This theoretical framework is usually applied to the modern
labour market, but it is also valuable for historical research. It clarifies, for example,
how segmentation in the labour market influenced mens and womens work in the
textile industry. Applying this analysis, we find that, even in periods without explicit
gender conflict, patriarchal and capitalist forces utilized the gender segmentation of
the labour market to redefine job status and labour relations in periods of economic
change. Although this could harm the economic position of all women and migrants,
it appears that single women were affected most by these mechanisms.

Capitalistic organisation tended [:::] to deprive women of opportunities for

sharing in the more profitable forms of production, confining them as wageearners to the unprotected trades.1

In her pioneering study from 1919, Alice Clark pointed out that in preindustrial times women had played a large part in production. But the rise
of capitalism and industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries changed things radically, for production was then taken out of
the home and consequently out of the hands of women.2
In the 1970s feminist historians like Louise Tilly and Joan Scott reverted
to Clarks idea that female workers had once experienced a golden age,
which they believed should be linked to the specific functioning of the preindustrial family economy, in which reproduction, production, and
consumption were closely connected. Because pre-industrial production
often took place in the domestic sphere, women had a large share in it.3

I should like to thank the editorial committee and three anonymous referees of the IRSH, and
my colleagues Lex Heerma van Voss, Danielle van den Heuvel, Jelle van Lottum, and Jan
Lucassen for their useful comments on earlier versions of this article.
1 Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919), p. 299.
2. Ibid., p. 12.
3. Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Women, Work and the Family (2nd edn, New York [etc.], 1989),
pp. 12, 60.

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Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

With the emergence of the capitalist economy, new and patriarchal

relations of production were born, and the rise of wage labour and the
separation of home and work affected womens economic activity most
particularly. They were shut out of public life as well as the labour market.4
Numerous historians adopted this idea of the good old times of
womens work. Some of them, including Bridget Hill and Merry Wiesner,
situated it in the early modern period,5 while others, such as Martha
Howell, placed it in medieval times.6 Their arguments were, however,
similar in all cases. Corporatism and capitalism supposedly pushed women
out of occupations in which they had been employed formerly and through
which they could reach a certain degree of status and independence.7
Conversely, historians like Judith Bennett and Peter Earle stressed the
continuity in the history of womens work. They questioned the idea that
there had ever been a golden age.8 Bennett emphasized a striking
continuity in the unequal division of power between men and women, and
in the subordination of the latter. She acknowledged that there were
different experiences for different groups of women, but in general, she
argued, patriarchy has confined women to low-status jobs and badly paid
occupations throughout history.9
There might be some truth in Bennetts view, for empirical research so
far does not point in the direction of a golden age for female workers. In
the pre-industrial period economic possibilities for women were almost
always less than those for men, and women have almost always been
clustered in lower-skilled, low-status and lower-paid occupations.10
However, the theoretical assumption of unchanging patriarchy poses
4. Ibid., pp. 104, 144145; Amanda Vickery, Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the
Categories and Chronology of English Womens History, in Pamela Sharpe (ed.), Womens
Work: The English Experience (London, 1998), pp. 294332, 294299.
5. Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford,
1989); Merry E. Wiesner, Spinsters and Seamstresses: Women in Cloth and Clothing
Production, in M.W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N.J. Vickers (eds), Rewriting the
Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference on Early Modern Europe (Chicago, IL,
1986), pp. 191205.
6. Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, IL,
1986).
7. Els Kloek, Wie hij zij, man of wijf. Vrouwengeschiedenis en de vroegmoderne tijd: Drie Leidse
studies (Hilversum, 1990), pp. 2728.
8. Judith Bennett, History that Stands Still: Womens Work in the European Past, Feminist
Studies, 14 (1988), pp. 269283; Peter Earle, The Female Labour Market in London in the Late
Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries, Economic History Review, 42 (1989), pp.
328353.
9. Judith Bennett, Womens History: A Study in Continuity and Change, in Sharpe, Womens
Work, pp. 5864.
10. Ad Knotter, Problems of the Family Economy: Peasant Economy, Domestic Production
and Labour Markets in Pre-Industrial Europe, Economic and Social History in the Netherlands,
6 (1994), pp. 1959, 2627, 43; Pamela Sharpe, Introduction, in idem, Womens Work, pp.
117, 78.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

191

serious problems for the historian, because it does not explain gender
inequalities nor changes in the relationships between the sexes.11
Since both views of the discourse on continuity or change have proved
to be problematic, the debate has lost much of its appeal over the last
decade. Some historians have shifted their focus to the importance of
womens work in the pre-industrial economy. They emphasize that we
still lack sufficient empirical research to understand clearly the functioning
of the early modern labour market and womens contribution to it. That
leads to some basic empirical questions, such as: What kind of labour did
women actually do?; How was the work divided between men and
women, and why was this so?.12 These historians deliberately place their
work in the mainstream economic-historical tradition, instead of in that
of feminist theory, but that does not mean that they overlook established
sexual inequalities between men and women in the past. Rather, they wish
to emphasize the importance of such power imbalances for investigating
broader themes in social and, especially, economic history.13
The quest for more empirical information to help give an accurate
historical perspective14 is valuable, but problematic. Empirical research
will offer us knowledge, as well as nuance and a more differentiated
picture.15 At the same time, it could raise the danger of overemphasizing
the developments discovered in female participation in the labour force as
path-dependent. As a result, it remains difficult to discern patterns or
make generalizations about womens work. Furthermore, while new
research might indeed have refuted old explanations for the sexual division
of labour, such as biological or natural arguments, or questions of skill
or status,16 it has not yet offered alternative explanations. We must
therefore derive a new theoretical framework to explain the working of
gender in the pre-industrial labour market.
PRE-INDUSTRIAL WOMENS WORK AND LABOURMARKET THEORIES

Historians of early modern womens work have largely neglected the

extensive efforts of economists and sociologists who have studied the
11. Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), pp. 3334. She
describes the patriarchal argument as a-historical.
12. Sharpe, Introduction, in idem, Womens Work, p. 12; idem, Womens History and
Economic History in Britain, in ibid., pp. 2342, 27; Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, A Bitter Living:
Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003), pp. 2342, 2, 5.
13. See, for example, Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English
Economy, 17001850 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 6; Ogilvie, A Bitter Living, pp. 34.
14. Sharpe, Introduction, in idem, Womens Work, p. 12.
15. A good example here is Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, pp. 149153.
16. For instance Deborah Simonton, A History of European Womens Work: 1700 to the Present
(London, 1998), pp. 7683.

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Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

modern labour market. Even so, their theories might offer us just
the explanations we need for labour market dynamics. In the early 1970s
Edna Bonacich introduced an important theory of split labour markets,17
which offered, in short, the prediction that labour markets tend always to
be split along ethnic lines, or by gender. A split labour market contains at
least two groups of workers, whose labour price differs for the same work,
or would so differ if they did the same work.18 This can be explained by the
fact that their work is often temporary, and so migrants and women are in
a position to agree to work for lower wages and under worse conditions
than, say, white males would tolerate. Employers will naturally try to use
this ethnic or sexual antagonism to depress the price of labour.19 These
mechanisms enforce capitalist power over the workforce as a whole.
Although the split labour market approach can be very useful for
investigating class antagonism, it has its shortcomings with regard to the
analysis of labour among women, or among migrants. The theory ascribes
the secondary position in the labour market of migrants and women
chiefly to their characteristics as temporary workers, unreliable and
therefore powerless. It focuses on class conflict and power relations
between employers and their employees and tries to offer purely economic
explanations for these imbalances, such as competition or the price of
labour. However, it overlooks existing unequal power balances among
ethnic groups and between the sexes outside the labour market.
A more institutional approach is offered by the dual, or segmented,
labour market theory to explain sexual differences in the labour market.
This approach is focused not on competition, but on segmentation in the
labour market, and so pays more attention to institutional causes of power
imbalance between the sexes. Proponents of this theory perceive the
labour market to be divided into a core and a periphery, each having
fundamentally different characteristics. Different economic branches
belong either to the core or to the periphery, sometimes called primary
and secondary sectors.20 The core comprises highly productive, very
profitable and capital-intensive industries in which we find correspondingly differentiated task and wage schedules; well-defined career patterns,
with an important role for formal education; high wages; and a great deal
of labour organization. The periphery consists of industries comprising
small enterprises, which normally display low productivity and profit17. Edna Bonacich, A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market, American
Sociological Review, 37 (1972), pp. 547559.
18. Note that the price of labour depends not only on wages paid, but also on secondary
provisions such as recruitment and educational costs, room and board; ibid., p. 549.
19. Moshe Semyonov and Noah Lewin-Epstein, Segregation and Competition in Occupational
Labor Markets, Social Forces, 68 (1989), pp. 379396, 381.
20. Harriet Bradley, Mens Work, Womens Work: A Sociological History of the Sexual Division
of Labour in Employment (Cambridge, 1989), p. 65.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

193

ability and are usually labour-intensive, with consequently poor job

security and limited career opportunities. Wages in the periphery tend to
be low and labour organization limited, regardless of whether we are
considering men or women, whites, or blacks.21
The dual labour market theory could prove to be valuable too as a
framework for historical research into the early modern labour market,
since the dual structure most probably predates modern capitalism.22 The
pre-industrial economy encompassed branches that were high-status,
well-paid, and hardly accessible to subordinate social groups such as
women or migrants. Often, such core professions, with their vocational
training, were organized and regulated within guilds designed to protect
the occupational interests of their members. In that sense the dual labour
market approach is equally applicable to the early modern labour market.
However, since the theory was developed to help analyse economic
differences between sexual and ethnic groups in the modern industrial
economy, it does not reveal historical mechanisms and changes in the
labour market, so making the model rather static. In this article, I therefore
aim to combine the economic mechanisms of the split labour market
theory with the notions of sex segregation to be found in the dual labour
market approach. I will try to link labour market dynamics and theories of
patriarchy to historical social and economic developments. This will, on
the one hand, historicize theories about the labour market and patriarchy,
while on the other give more satisfactory explanations for past gender
divisions of labour.
Katrina Honeyman and Jordan Goodman have written one of the few
historical contributions to apply the dual labour market theory to early
modern womens work. In their excellent survey of European womens
work between 1500 and 1900, they claim that labour markets were indeed
segmented as early as the seventeenth century and probably even before
that. They argue that patriarchy and sex discrimination in the labour
market were usually implicit determinants, which came to the surface only
when the equilibrium of the segmented labour market was threatened in
times of economic change. At such moments of crisis, gender conflicts
occurred and, mainly through workers organizations such as guilds and
unions, patriarchal forces responded by redefining mens and womens
roles in work. Honeyman and Goodman assume that only two such
episodes have occurred in European history since the Middle Ages:
roughly in the sixteenth and then the nineteenth centuries.23 Honeyman
21. E.M. Beck, Patrick M. Horan, and Charles M. Tolbert II, Stratification in a Dual Economy:
a Sectoral Model of Earnings Determination, American Sociological Review, 43 (1978), pp. 704
720, 706707. See also Wendy C. Wolf and Rachel Rosenfeld, Sex Structure of Occupations and
Job Mobility, Social Forces, 56 (1978), pp. 823844.
22. See also Bradley, Mens Work, Womens Work, p. 66.
23. Katrina Honeyman and Jordan Goodman, Womens Work, Gender Conflict, and Labour

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Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

and Goodman suggest a rather stable situation in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, without explicit gender conflict, and therefore
without substantial changes in the sexual division of labour.
In this article, I should like to follow up on their work, using the
framework of the dual labour market theory. Contrary to Honeyman and
Goodman, however, I will argue that the gender division of labour was far
from stable in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were forces
other than explicit gender conflicts which stimulated changes in the labour
market. Mechanisms of class conflict (the rise of capitalism) and sex
segregation (patriarchy) might have worked together and reinforced one
another.24 To investigate the consequences for pre-industrial womens
work, I posit the following research questions. How did the mechanisms
of the dual labour market function in the pre-industrial economy, and how
did they affect womens work? How can we explain changes in the sexual
division of labour within the seemingly static framework of the dual
labour market? What role did patriarchy and capitalism play, and how can
we incorporate them into the model?
Following Marietta Morrissey,25 I think it is useful to analyse the dual or
segmented labour market at the level of a specific industry or even branch
of an industry. An important reason for this is that we have no macro-level
statistical data for most pre-industrial economies. For several reasons, my
focus will be on the Dutch textile industry during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. First of all, because market production of textiles was
one of the most important industries leading to Dutch economic growth.
Although Dutch primacy in world trade has long been emphasized,26
recently more attention has been given to the impact of industry on
economic growth in the early modern Netherlands.27 Secondly, such longterm analysis will make it possible to distinguish between periods of
economic growth and decline; exactly those dynamics could prove decisive
in explaining certain developments in the labour market. The third reason
is that, like everywhere else in the world, traditionally both women and
men played a large part in pre-industrial textile production in the Dutch
Republic.28
Markets in Europe, 15001900, Economic History Review, 44 (1991), pp. 608628, 608610,
624.
24. This was suggested also by Heidi Hartmann, Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation
by Sex, Signs, 1 (1976), pp. 137169.
25. Marietta Morrissey, The Dual Economy and Labor Market Segmentation: A Comment on
Lord and Falk, Social Forces, 60 (1982), pp. 883890, 887.
26. Most notably by Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 15851740 (Oxford,
1989).
27. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and
Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 15001815 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 270.
28. Ibid., pp. 270272; Leo Noordegraaf and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Early Modern Economic
Growth and the Standard of Living: Did Labour Benefit from Hollands Golden Age?, in Karel

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

195

Groningen

Se

Friesland

No

rth

Drenthe

Holland

Haarlem

Overijssel

Amsterdam

Leiden
Utrecht

Guelders

Zeeland

Tilburg
Brabant

Figure 1. Map of the northern Netherlands, c.16291795.

It will appear that within the textile industry there was a distinct division
of labour which can be linked to specific professions representing both
core and periphery occupations. Furthermore, we shall see that even the
conception of what were high-status, highly skilled and organized (and so
core) jobs will prove to have been rather flexible in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
Davids and Jan Lucassen (eds), A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective
(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 410437, 426.

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Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

TWO CASE STUDIES: LEIDEN AND TILBURG

In broad terms, we can divide the textile history of the Dutch Republic
into two periods closely linked to the economic development of the
region. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the province of
Holland was the economic centre of the Republic and perhaps of the
whole world. Leiden and Haarlem, two cities in Holland, specialized
most notably in the weaving of respectively wool and linen. In the last
quarter of the sixteenth century both cities had attracted from textile
areas in Flanders and Wallonia a large number of Protestants who were
fleeing Catholic Spanish troops. These refugees gave a new impulse to the
existing Dutch textile industries.
A great many weavers settled especially in Leiden, and they successfully
introduced the sayette industry, which produced a new kind of light
drapery made from cheaper combed wool; this light drapery became very
popular around that time. Leidens textile industry boomed and the city
became the largest European cloth producer for more than half a century.
Although the sayette industry lost ground to international competition
after 1630, the production of a new lighter type of cloth from carded wool
(laken) kept Leidens textile industry alive. It reached a peak in 1664, but
then international and domestic competition started to affect its prominent
position. Production figures began to decline swiftly after that date and
continued to fall throughout the eighteenth century.29
From 1650, the weaving of wool and linen gradually shifted to more
outlying and agrarian regions of the Republic, notably the eastern province
of Overijssel and of Brabant in the south. Since the Peace of Westphalia in
1648, those border provinces no longer laboured under conditions of war.
Merchants from Holland started to contract weavers and spinners in those
regions, since wages there were much lower. The shift of weaving to such
areas in the countryside caused Leiden and Haarlem to concentrate more
closely on the highly skilled work of finishing textiles and trading in them.
In fact, in Haarlem after 1650 the actual weaving of linen was abandoned
completely.30 Leiden, despite its drastic decline, still remained the largest
producer of woollen wefts until about 1800, although competition grew
during this period from Tilburg, a village in Brabant.
Around 1600, woollen cloth production in Tilburg was centred mostly
on its own regional market. That changed, probably in the Twelve-Year
Truce from 16091621, during which trade increased with the province of
Holland. Because Tilburg was hostile territory until 1629 and after then
29. For production figures see N.W. Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie, 3 vols (The Hague, 19081939).
30. F. Mulder, De Haarlemse textielnijverheid in de periode 15751800, in H. Rombouts
(ed.), Haarlem ging op wollen zolen: opkomst, bloei en ondergang van de textielnijverheid aan
het Spaarne (Schoorl, 1995), p. 64.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

197

belonged to the Generality Lands of the Republic, many trade barriers

continued to exist, mostly in the form of tariffs and excises. Still,
production rose steadily and in 1687 the central authorities granted
Tilburg special permission to trade textiles with Holland without the usual
taxes, which stimulated its economy even more.31 Although we do not
have much data, it appears that Tilburg, like Leiden, experienced a decline
in the first half of the eighteenth century, but Tilburg seems to have
recovered in the later eighteenth century, since at the beginning of the
nineteenth it had outgrown Leiden as a cloth-producing area.32
Because Leiden and Tilburg were two of the most important textile
areas, and each experienced a quite different economic development, they
serve as excellent comparative and complementary case studies. Moreover,
in both municipalities quantitative as well as qualitative source material
allows us to draw conclusions about labour market developments. In the
next section, I shall briefly elaborate on the sources, and on my method.

SOURCES AND METHOD

It is not easy to make a reconstruction of the early modern Dutch labour

market. Systematic occupational data on the entire population, which are
available for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had not then been
collected. No statistical institutions existed to take samples or otherwise
investigate the occupational structure of the population. The federal
political structure of the Republic until 1795 did not exactly stimulate the
development of a national statistical practice.33
Fortunately, many local taxation and census registers have survived
sometimes with data on occupation. They, of course, offer us only a
snapshot of the early modern labour market at any particular moment,
which certainly does not do justice to the usual complexity and flexibility
of the early modern labour market, in which people had more than one
job, frequently changed their jobs, and often did seasonal work. We must
also reckon with the fact that many people, and most especially women,
performed economic activities not formally regarded as professions.34
Such individuals, and among them women, were registered, if at all,
probably without an occupational record; while usually in any case only
31. Gerard van Gurp, Brabantse stoffen op de wereldmarkt: Proto-industrialisering in de Meierij
van s-Hertogenbosch 16201820 (Tilburg, 2004), pp. 4653.
32. Idem, De Tilburgse lakenhandel met Holland en Brabant in de zeventiende en achttiende
eeuw, Textielhistorische bijdragen, 38 (1998), pp. 6061. See also idem, Brabantse stoffen op de
wereldmarkt, pp. 181, 198.
33. P.M.M. Klep and I.H. Stamhuis, The Statistical Mind in a Pre-Statistical Era: The
Netherlands 17501850 (Amsterdam, 2002), pp. 1920.
34. Knotter, Problems of the Family Economy, p. 44; Ogivie, A Bitter Living, p. 24.

198

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

heads of households were listed, and that of course left unrecorded the
work of many women who were married or resident in households.
All the same, these sources give us the most complete information there
is about the entire early modern labour market, and of course include
female heads of households. For Leiden as well as Tilburg there are several
useful sources for a gender analysis of the labour market throughout the
period. In the Leiden archives, registrations of all heads of household have
survived for 1581, just before the economic rise of the textile industry, and
for 1749, the period of its decline. For the more prosperous period there is
a tax registration of 1674, which unfortunately only listed fewer than 5 per
cent of the entire population, though that still amounted to about 20 per
cent of all the citys heads of households. Although women were clearly
underrepresented in this register, it still gives us some important clues
about womens work in textiles.35 For Tilburg there is a tax list for 1665,
when the wool industry was just about to expand hugely, and there is a
census from 1810, which contains lists not only of heads of households, but
of all family members, including married women (working or otherwise)
and children.36
Table 1 gives an overview of the percentage of female household heads
with an occupation listed in the various sources used. Increasing or declining
numbers of female heads of households will tell us little about female labour
participation but can make clear how many women were at least responsible
for providing for a familys income. For the work of women such as married
women or daughters, who were not heads of households, other archive
material will be used. Judicial records containing occupational information
on married women, and the registration of children who were hired out
under contract, can shed more light on their work.37
Because the source material mostly provides data on all male as well as
female heads of households, it is possible to make a comparative
quantitative analysis at different instants, results from which can help to
discern and try to explain changes in the labour market throughout the
early modern period. Using the framework of the dual labour market, it
will be possible to analyse the division and changes in labour by gender.
35. Regionaal archief Leiden [hereafter, RAL], Stadsarchief II [hereafter, SA II], inv. no. 1289,
Register van de Volkstelling. See also Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche
lakenindustrie, vol. 2. De nieuwe tijd (zestiende tot achttiende eeuw). De lakenindustrie en
verwante industrieen. Tweede en derde deel (s-Gravenhage, 1939), pp. 1840; RAL, SA II, inv.
no. 1078, Kohier van het Klein Familiegeld. See also G.J. Peltjes, Leidse lasten. Twee
belastingkohieren uit 1674 (Leiden, 1995); RAL, SA II, inv. nos 41214128, Kohieren van de
omslag 1749.
36. Regionaal Historisch Centrum Tilburg [hereafter, RHCT], Dorpsbestuur, inv. no. 180I,
and ibid., Volkstellingen, inv. nos 12751277, Volkstelling 1810.
37. RAL, Archief Hallen, inv. nos 127aj, Leerjonghensboucken, 16381656; ibid., inv. nos
216221, Questyboecken, 16381767; RAL, Oud Rechterlijk archief, inv. no. 3, Criminele
vonnisboeken.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

199

Table 1. Sources and their coverage

Region and
year

Type of source

Registration coverage

Leiden 1581 Population

All heads of households
registration
Leiden 1674 Tax registration Heads of households with income
of 365 guilders a year or more
Leiden 1749 Tax registration All heads of households
Tilburg 1665 Tax registration All heads of households
Tilburg 1810 Population
Whole population, incl. married
registration
women and children

% female heads
of households
with occupation
13.6
10.7
20.1
12.2
22.9

MALE AND FEMALE TEXTILE WORKERS IN LEIDEN

At the end of the sixteenth century Leidens economy was already firmly
industrially based, with about two-thirds of all heads of households working
in the industrial sector. Although the absolute numbers differed greatly,
percentages were similar for male and female heads.38 However, within the
sector there were large differences between mens and womens occupations, clearly indicating a segmented labour market (see Table 2 overleaf).
In 1581, almost all female heads of households who worked in industry
were seamstresses or cleaners in garment production (24 per cent), or in
textile production (more than 73 per cent). For male heads, the range of
professions was much broader although textiles (30 per cent) formed the
most important branch for them too. But the other 70 per cent worked in the
construction, wood, leather and metal branches, or in the production of
garments, or food. All these occupational groups contained about 10 per cent
of the total number of male heads of households in the industrial sector, and
most of the occupations were organized into craft guilds, which represented
organized, often well-paid and highly skilled labour, having many of the
characteristics of core industries. Women were usually excluded from guild
membership, except that in some guilds they were accepted as craftsmens
widows. Usually, then, they were barred from core industries.39 It is of
course possible that wives and daughters of craftsmen assisted in or even
took over the work of their husbands or fathers, but if so that hardly ever
appears in official records, and their participation was neither institutionalized in any way, nor especially beneficial to them as individuals.40
38. 1,352 (66.2 per cent) of all 2,043 male heads and 211 (65.7 per cent) of all 321 female heads
with an occupational record worked in industry; RAL, SA II, Volkstelling 1581.
39. P. Lourens and J. Lucassen, De oprichting en ontwikkeling van ambachtsgilden in
Nederland (13de19de eeuw), in C. Lis and H. Soly (eds), Werelden van verschil.
Ambachtsgilden in de Lage Landen (Brussels, 1997), pp. 5455.
40. See for example Tilly and Scott, Women, Work and the Family, pp. 4749.

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Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

Table 2. Male and female heads of households per industrial sector: Leiden,
1581 and 1749
Branch

1581
m

Construction
Chemistry
Earthenware/glass/stone industry
Fine arts
Food and tobacco
Garment industry
Leather
Metalworking
Oil/grease/soap production
Paper production
Printing
Textile industry
Wagon/shipbuilding
Weapon/instrument production
Wood/cork/straw working

133 9.8
9 0.7
36 2.7
3 0.2
178 13.2
106 7.8
161 11.9
137 10.1
16 1.2

1749
f

4 1.9
51 24.2

7 0.5
404 29.9 155 73.5
31 2.3
1 0.1
130 9.6
1 0.5
1,352
211

438 8.7
4
37 0.7
1
38 0.8
1
13 0.3
402 8.0
19
207 4.1
216
251 5.0
3
101 2.0
2
16 0.3
9 0.2
34 0.7
2
3,230 64.2 1,176
28 0.6
48 1.0
1
180 3.6
8
5,032
1,433

%
0.3
0.1
0.1
1.3
15.1
0.2
0.1
0.1
82.1
0.1
0.6

Sources: see n. 35

The segmentation of the labour market could also reveal itself at a

branch level, as the textile industry shows (see Table 3).
Most female heads of households in this branch worked as wool spinners or
combers. In the category other we also find some women carding and
pilling wool. All in all, womens work mainly concerned the low-skilled
preparatory stages of cloth production. Only three women were listed as
drapers, and there was but one female weaver. For male heads of households
the situation was entirely different. In 1581 the woollen industry was the
largest employer for men too, but in contrast to the situation for women they
could find jobs in any stage of the production process. Some men worked as
combers or spinners, but most of them were linen or wool weavers, drapers,
or cloth finishers.
The segmentation of the labour market by gender was quite marked in
1581. While men worked chiefly in jobs with a higher status, like weaving
and finishing, womens work was restricted to relatively low-paid
activities like spinning and combing.41 This segmentation was not
41. The low level of wages hand spinners received, in spite of the large demand for spinning
labour, is often ascribed to the fact that it was a by-employment for women and children, and
because it was a less skilled job. Conversely, it might just as well be argued that spinning was
poorly paid precisely because women and children did it; M. Berg, The Age of Manufactures
17001820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (London, 1994), pp. 134143; Simonton,
A History of European Womens Work, pp. 7083.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

201

Table 3. Men and women in the textile industry: Leiden, 1581, 1674 and
1749
Occupation

1581
m
(n 404)

1674*

f
(n 148)

% of all
% of
all men in women in
textiles
textiles
Draper
Wool weaver
Spinner
Knitter
Finisher
Dyer
Twiner
Comber
Linen weaver
Other
Total

13.4
17.1
1.7
1.5
7.2
3.7
0.3
3.0
35.9
16.3
100

1.9
0.7
80.7
0.7
0
1.3
0
7.7
0
7.1
100

1749

m
f
m
f
(n 450) (n 40) (n 3230) (n 1176)
% of all % of all % of all
men in women in men in
textiles
textiles
textiles
27.6
20.0
1.3
1.6
8.7
12.9
2.4
6.7
0.7
18.2
100

37.5
7.5
0
7.5
2.5
20.0
10.0
2.5
0
12.5
100

3.3
40.3
23.9
1.7
10.5
3.7
2.5
2.3
0.1
11.7
100

% of all
women in
textiles
0.7
0.4
69.3
9.3
0.1
0.1
12.2
0.4
0
7.5
100

*NB: Only heads of households who earned 365 guilders or more per year are
included.

Sources: see n. 35
necessarily linked to the dominance of guilds. The Leiden weavers guild
had been abolished in the 1560s, but weaving was still not accessible
equally to women. Explicit formal rules excluding women from weaving
were likewise absent, and it seems almost that the prevailing segmentation
was natural or at least widely accepted. Although there are hints that
craftsmens wives and daughters in fact received training informally in
their husbands or fathers professions, that gave them no formal
prerogative to carry on the business on their own account.42
The relevance of formal training is reflected also in data on child labour.
In seventeenth-century Leiden many children were contracted out to
master spinners and weavers either by orphanages or by their parents.
Orphans, sometimes as young as four of five, were sent out to spin, wind,
or weave for low wages. Although officially sent out to learn a profession,
in practice they were usually no more than a cheap source of labour for
their masters. In the first half alone of the seventeenth century, about 3,500
orphans, boys and girls, were registered as working in the textile
industry.43 Children who still had a family were contracted out to work
42. RAL, Questyboeken, 591767.
43. RAL, Bestedingsboeken weeskinderen.

202

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

with a master for typically a couple of years, being usually somewhat older
when they started, perhaps about eleven or twelve. In the period from 1638
to 1697 nearly 8,500 children were hired out by their parents or other
relatives they might have been living with, some to earn piece-rates or even
weekly wages, but the majority receiving only free board and lodging for
two or three years. That was of course in itself a great relief to many a poor
family, because not only did the child learn how to spin or weave, he or she
was also out of the familys responsibility for a substantial period of time.44
Even among children, a certain degree of division of labour by gender
can early be discerned. Both girls and boys were hired while very young to
perform low-skilled duties like spinning and winding, and the wages they
received varied according to age rather than sex. But it seems that, in
contrast to girls, most boys were able to make progress in their
professional training. When boys reached the age of thirteen or fourteen,
they were usually allowed to learn weaving or shearing. Their salaries
increased significantly when they moved to the higher-status jobs. Most
girls kept on with their spinning, sometimes for years, until they were
young adults. Their weekly wage did rise, but only slightly in keeping with
their experience. Most of them, apart from the occasional cloth trimmer,
were not expected to learn any trade within the industry other than
spinning.45
Apparently, the segmentation of the labour market was established in
the early phase of adolescence, when vocational training started, and in
Leiden that often happened outside the framework of a guild. From a
young age, schooling was adjusted to boys and girls expected future roles,
although in truth marriage was not every womans prospect. In most of
Europe, as in the Republic, there was an imbalance in the sex ratio, with 10
to 20 per cent of all women never being married.46 Unmarried women did
not have the protection of a husband, nor did they gain the rights some
widows inherited; and for them the dual labour market implied exclusion
from high-status, well-paid jobs.
The tax registration of 1674 lists only those heads of households who
had an average daily income of one guilder or more.47 As we expect that
many women worked in the lower-paid textile professions, that is
44. RAL, Leerjonghensboucken.
45. Compare RAL, Bestedingsboeken, with RAL, Leerjonghensboucken. A similar division of
labour between male and female apprentices has been found elsewhere. See for instance
D. Simonton, Apprenticeship: Training and Gender in Eighteenth-Century England, in M.
Berg (ed.), Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (London, 1991), pp. 227260.
46. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, A Singular Past, in idem (eds), Single Women in
the European Past 12501800 (Philadelphia, PA, 1999), pp. 127, 2.
47. One guilder 20 stuivers. The average daily income of a carpenter (fairly skilled work)
around 1650 was 2428 stuivers. A 12-pound ryebread cost around 15 stuivers in the same
period; Leo Noordegraaf, Daglonen in Alkmaar 15001850 ([The Hague], 1980), p. 138; idem,
Hollands welvaren? Levensstandaard in Holland 14501650 (Bergen, 1985), pp. 2627.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

203

Figure 2. A weaver is assisted by a woman, probably his wife or daughter. In the middle, another
woman is reeling yarn, while a little boy is watching, holding his baby sister. This scene
illustrates that women indeed worked together with their husbands and fathers, even if they are
absent in official sources.
Weavers Shop, painting by Cornelis Beelt, c.1650. Collection Museum Bredius, The Hague.

probably not the most representative source for them. Nevertheless,

relatively many female heads of households who were subject to tax
worked in the textile industry. Apparently forty women, only half of
whom were widows,48 were able to make a more than reasonable income
from this industry, most of them as cloth drapers. Of all drapers and
weavers in the cloth industry 8 per cent were women; a high number
compared to the 3 per cent of drapers and weavers who were female in
1581 and the mere 0.9 per cent in 1749. The prosperity of the Leiden textile
industry, at its zenith in the 1660s, had created some opportunities for both
widowed and unmarried women in core textile jobs.
Another striking development was a gender reversal among woolcombers. In the sixteenth century, wool-combing had been a female affair,
while a century later it had become almost exclusively male. Around 1700,
a wool-combers guild was established and the only women who could
48. Ariadne Schmidt, Overleven na de dood. Weduwen in Leiden in de Gouden Eeuw
(Amsterdam, 2001), p. 123.

204

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

join this guild were the widows of deceased members.49 The explanation
for the change is again linked to economic trends. Although the textile
(notably carded wool) industry flourished until the 1660s, the sayette
(combed wool) industry had deteriorated after 1630. It is probable that
with this falling market share, men tried to protect their employment in the
industry, even if only in peripheral jobs. To secure their profession, they
institutionalized it into a guild, thereby formally excluding women,
whether married or not. This institutionalizing could not prevent further
decline in the long run, as revealed by a petition in 1750, in which the
wool-combers complained of the languishing state of their guild.50
But also in the booming cloth industry, we see that men were entering
peripheral professions. From the beginning of the seventeenth century
numbers of male spinners increased, many of whom were so-called
master spinners who subcontracted other wage earning spinners on
behalf of drapers and weavers,51 so that the putting-out system and
subcontracting then became widespread in the textile industry at Leiden.
Drapers or master spinners engaged normally home-based workers,
providing them with the necessary raw materials and paying them when
they had spun their yarn or woven their fabric. So it was that wage labour
became increasingly significant. Developments of organization of this kind
similarly stimulated the distinction between wage-labouring spinners, who
were most likely to be female, and subcontracting master spinners, almost
all of them male. Although they entered peripheral jobs like woolcombing and spinning, men distinguished themselves from women by
institutionalizing their work, or by calling themselves master spinner or
using other such guild-like titles even in the absence of a guild.
A comparison between the registers of 1581 and 1749 shows some
remarkable differences. Leidens economy had stagnated and even
declined since the 1660s, but still the total population of the city was
three times what it had been in 1581,52 since when the industrial sector had
grown immensely. That growth had been brought about mainly by the
incredible rise in textile production during the seventeenth century. Shifts
among several branches of industry indicate that Leidens economy had
become ever more dependent on textile production. In 1749, more than 58
49. RAL, Archief Gilden, inv. no. (1374), Nieuwe ordonnantie voor de wolkammers en
sajetverkopers.
50. RAL, Archief Gilden, inv. no. 1374/12, Wool-combers guild request to City Council.
51. See RAL, Archief H.G. Weeshuis, inv. nos 38443849, Bestedingsboeken weeskinderen. In
the course of the century, this phenomenon grew; N.W. Posthumus (ed.), Bronnen tot de
geschiedenis van de Leidsche textielnijverheid. Vijfde deel, 16511702 (s-Gravenhage, 1918),
pp. 569570; 613614.
52. 1581: 12,000, and 1749: 37,000 inhabitants. The city had approximately 70,000 inhabitants
around 1660 the heyday of the textile industry; B.M.A. de Vries, De Leidse textielnijverheid
in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw, in J.K.S. Moes and B.M.A. de Vries, Stof uit het Leidse
verleden: Zeven eeuwen textielnijverheid (Utrecht, 1991), pp. 7789, 85.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

205

per cent of all male heads of households working in industry were

employed in the textile branch, compared with fewer than 30 per cent in
1581. The proportion in the textile branch had been even larger around
1650, when the industry still flourished.53
The last two columns in Table 3 (p. 201) provide detailed information
about Leidens male and female textile workers in 1749. While at the end of
the sixteenth century more than 13 per cent of all male heads of households
employed in textiles were drapers, and so closely involved with the
management or organization of the production process, that percentage
had dropped to 3.3 in 1749. The percentage of male wool weavers, on the
other hand, had more than doubled by 1749, which together points to a
concentration of power in the industry. The proportion of independent
producers and drapers diminished as more weavers became wage labourers
for fewer and richer entrepreneurs.54
The partial movement of weaving to Tilburg meant that finishing and
dyeing had become more important, as mentioned above, but the most
appreciably remarkable change since 1581 was the enormous rise in the
number of male spinners. In 1581 only seven male heads of households
were spinners, a figure representing not even as much as 2 per cent of all
male heads in the industry; but by the middle of the eighteenth century
almost one-quarter of all male heads of households were spinners. Indeed,
there were almost as many men (771) as women (815) registered as
spinner in 1749. Apparently, the process of proletarianization led many
men to become wage-labouring spinners, which greatly affected the
segmentation of the labour market by gender. For female heads of
households in the textile branch, spinning was still the most important
activity, but the percentage had dropped from over 80 per cent in 1581 to
69 per cent in 1749.
In fact, and contrary to the suggestion of Honeyman and Goodman, the
division of labour between men and women was reshaped constantly
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a state of affairs influenced by both economic and institutional developments. Certainly, during
the heyday of the wool industry in Leiden, the economic possibilities for
women increased and in 1674, just after the industrys peak, there were
relatively large numbers of women in core professions like draping and
dyeing, in comparison with the years 1581 and 1749. However, when parts
of the industry began to decline, women were not only pushed out of
highly skilled jobs, they also faced increasing competition from men in
lower-skilled peripheral jobs. The same situation almost certainly affected
female labour participation rates too. While in 1749 28.3 per cent of all
53. H.D. Tjalsma, Leidse textielarbeiders, in Moes and De Vries, Stof uit het Leidse verleden,
pp. 9199, p. 93.
54. See also Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie, vol. 2, pp. 502504.

206

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

Figure 3. Although the man in this painting is usually referred to as male spinner, he is actually
reeling the yarn. Male spinners are seldom depicted by artists, but they certainly existed in the
pre-industrial period.
A Wool Spinner and His Wife, painting by Quirijn Gerritsz van Brekelenkam, c.1653.
Philadelphia Museum of Art: John G. Johnson Collection, 1917, cat. 535.

officially registered textile workers were women, in 1808 the proportion

was only 21.7 per cent.55 Although many more men were now present in
lower-skilled jobs like spinning, womens labour opportunities in the
textile industry declined completely.
THE LABOUR MARKET IN TILBURG: 1665 AND 1810
COMPARED

Despite its expanding textile industry, Tilburgs economy remained

predominantly agrarian around 1665. More than half of all heads of
households were farmers, peasants, or agricultural day labourers. The
industrial sector was by then already somewhat developed, but social and
economic services were barely in existence in Tilburg. Occupational
opportunities for women differed vastly from those of men. Only 13 per
55. H.A. Diederiks, Beroepsstructuur en sociale stratificatie in Leiden in het midden van de
achttiende eeuw, in H.A. Diederiks, D.J. Noordam, and H.D. Tjalsma (eds), Armoede en sociale
spanning. Sociaal-historische studies over Leiden in de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum, 1985), p. 51.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

207

cent of all working heads of households were women and of them fewer
than one-fifth worked in agriculture. Female day labourers in the field
were rare, and no unmarried women were listed as farmers. All women
listed as farmer were widows who had most probably continued to work
the farm they and their husbands had built up together.
In the industrial sector, textiles were by far the most important
component, for men and women alike (see Table 4 overleaf). However,
while one-quarter of male heads of household worked in other branches,
women did not have such alternative options. Trades requiring a specific
skill, shoemaking, woodworking or printing for instance, or relatively
well-paid jobs such as carpentry, and any capital-intensive businesses like
milling, were all performed by men. Although there were very few guilds
in Tilburg,56 these core branches of industry were not open to women.
In the Tilburg textile industry there was little occupational differentiation
for either sex. Almost all women were spinners, and there were hardly any
female weavers, apart from the occasional widow who probably continued
her husbands craft. For men, by contrast, weaving was by far the most
important trade in the textile industry. Three-quarters of all male heads of
households who worked in textiles were weavers, most of them weavers of
wool, although linen weaving was very important too (see Table 5 overleaf).
Apart from spinning and weaving, there were few alternatives for men in
the textile industry. The Estates General allowed Tilburg to produce only
white cloth, which was further processed outside the village. White cloth
was brought to several cities of Holland, including Amsterdam, Rotterdam
and, increasingly, Leiden, where it was dyed and finished by other
craftsmen.57 If a man in the textile industry did not weave, the chance was
that he was a spinner. There were 54 male heads of households who were
spinners, and we know for certain that 39 of them spun wool. Of the 131
female spinners, only 6 definitely spun wool. It is not precisely known
what raw material all the other female spinners used, but it seems that
when nothing is explicitly mentioned they were spinning flax.58 Thus it
appears that men were more likely to be spinners of wool and women
spinners of flax to provide yarn for the villages many linen weavers. A
gender division in labour based on the raw materials processed might then
explain the relatively high percentage of male spinners. Presumably,
spinning of the more valuable material wool paid better than the
spinning of cheaper flax and so was done mostly by men. Even within a
peripheral activity like spinning, a hierarchy was discernible, generally
assigning to men the best-paid and higher-status processing of wool.
56. Database Guilds IISH. I am grateful to Piet Lourens here.
57. Van Gurp, Brabantse stoffen op de wereldmarkt, pp. 4853.
58. See also Hilde van Wijngaarden, Zorg voor de kost. Armenzorg, arbeid en onderlinge hulp in
Zwolle 1650-1700 (Amsterdam, 2000), p. 167.

208

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

Table 4. Male and female heads of households per industrial sector: Tilburg,
1665 and 1810
Branch

Construction
Chemistry
Earthenware/glass/stone industry
Fine arts
Food and tobacco
Garment industry
Leather
Metalworking
Oil/grease/soap production
Paper production
Printing
Textile industry
Wagon/shipbuilding
Weapon/instrument production
Wood/cork/straw working

1665
m

13
1
1

3.4
0.3
0.3

12
28
20
11

3.1
7.2
5.2
2.8

1
285
16
388

1810
f

0.7

0.3
73.5 139 99.3
4.1
140

63
1
15

5.3
0.1
1.3

45
47
65
23
3

3.8
3.9
5.5
1.9
0.3

894 75.0
8 0.7
5 0.4
23 1.9
1,192

1
55
1
1

0.2
10.8
0.2
0.2

452 88.6

510

Sources: see n. 36

By 1810, more than a century and a half later, there had been a
transformation of the labour market. Agriculture, the most important
sector in the mid-seventeenth century, now provided work for only about
15 per cent of the entire population. Economic services, notably trade and
transport, had grown somewhat, both relatively and in absolute terms, but
it was the industrial sector that had expanded most. Over 67 per cent of all
heads of households worked in the sector at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, growth caused primarily by the expansion of the
textile industry, although other branches such as construction, food
production, and clothing manufacture had all developed greatly since
1665. In fact, this mainly affected the situation for men, since women still
had few job opportunities outside textile and garment production (see
Table 4). Of all 510 female heads of households in industry, only three all
widows worked outside textile and garment production: one of them in
the metal industry, one in leather, and one in food production.
In the textile industry as a whole, an increased occupational differentiation can be detected when compared to the situation in 1665 (see Table 5),
at least for male workers. The shearing and dyeing of cloth, finishing
processes that were hardly carried out at all in seventeenth-century
Tilburg, were now done by 132 (male) heads of households, a development
which confirms the general view that textile production there had
gradually become more autonomous as dependence on merchants and

Occupation

1665
m (n 285)

Spinner
Knitter
Piller
Comber
Wool-weaver
Cloth manufacturer
Finisher
Dyer
Linen-weaver
Other
Total
Sources: see n. 36

1810
f (n 139)

m (n 830)

f (n 447)

% of
men in
industry

% of
men in
textiles

% of
women in
industry

% of
women in
textiles

% of
men in
industry

% of
men in
textiles

% of
women
in industry

% of
women in
textiles

13.9
0
0
0
33.8
0
0
0
21.4
4.4
73.5

19.0
0
0
0
46.0
0
0
0
29.1
6.0

93.6
1.4
0
0
1.4
0
0
0
1.4
1.4
99.2

94.2
1.4
0
0
1.4
0
0
0
1.4
1.4

19.1
0
0.2
2.9
32.7
1.1
9.1
1.9
0.1
2.5
69.6

27.5
0
0.2
4.1
46.9
1.6
13.1
2.8
0.2
3.6

81.6
0.4
3.9
0
1.4
0
0
0
0
0.2
87.5

93.1
0.5
4.5
0
1.6
0
0
0
0
0.2

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

Table 5. Male and female heads of households in the textile industry: Tilburg, 1665 and 1810

209

210

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

putting-out salesmen from Holland had lessened in the eighteenth century.

That did not mean that the weavers themselves had been able to maintain
their individual independence. On the contrary, they were on the payrolls
of the many cloth manufacturers in the town, who tended to be men born
in Tilburg.59 From other sources, we can see that wage-earning weavers
became ever more dependent, since in the seventeenth century they could
still buy wool for themselves and sell the cloth they made with it, but
during the eighteenth century they were increasingly commonly weaving
on the orders of manufacturers.60 Another factor contributing to this
proletarianization was the circumstance that most of them did not own
enough land to grow their own food, not least because Tilburgs
population had risen by almost half since 1665.61
About half of all male heads of households working in textiles in 1810
were weavers. There were only 7 female weavers, all of them widows. But
many more male heads of households were listed as spinner than had
been so in 1665: 228 men (or 27.5 per cent of all male textile workers) were
spinners. Capitalist developments clearly not only degraded the profession
of weaving, they also led to increasing numbers of men in peripheral jobs
like spinning. Some women were able to find alternative employment in
the garment industry, where changes in fashion had increased demand for
tailors and seamstresses. That was the case particularly for womens
clothing, which was usually produced by women.62
Again, the dual labour market manifested itself as early as in childhood.
Of all boys under the age of eighteen years, about 25 per cent had an
occupational record in 1810, while for girls the percentage was even a
little higher at 28 per cent. Table 6 shows how important the textile
industry was for those working boys and girls. Almost 90 per cent of girls
and more than 70 per cent of boys worked as spinners. Furthermore,
fifty-five boys were classed as weavers as opposed to only two girls. Boys
were far more likely than girls to receive training in other branches of
industry. In weaving, the division of labour between girls and boys was
almost complete in Tilburg, as it was in Leiden, but for spinning it was
much less clear. In many ways then, from the ages of twelve or fourteen
59. P.J.M. van Gorp, Tilburg, eens de wolstad van Nederland. Bloei en ondergang van de
Tilburgse wollenstoffenindustrie (Eindhoven, 1987), p. 71. Of all sixty-nine manufacturers, only
eleven were not born in Tilburg. Two of them were born in Germany, two came from Leiden,
and two from Amsterdam. The other five were all from the province of Brabant; RHCT,
Volkstelling 1810.
60. This follows from my analysis of large numbers of civil court trials about wool payments and
wage conflicts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; RHCT, Schepenbank Tilburg, inv.
nos 16006000.
61. Gerard van Gurp, Proto-industrialisatie in Tilburg en Geldrop, Textielhistorische
bijdragen, 39 (1999), p. 37.
62. Bibi Panhuysen, Maatwerk: kleermakers, naaisters, oudkleerkopers en de gilden (1500
1800) (Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 104107.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

211

Table 6. Labour of boys and girls younger than eighteen: Tilburg, 1810
Spinning
Weaving
Textile other
Other industries
Farming
Servant
Other professions
Total

Boys

Girls

324
55
4
29
20
16
4
452

71.7
12.2
0.9
6.4
4.4
3.5
0.9
100

476
2
6
10
4
44
0
542

87.8
0.4
1.1
1.8
0.7
8.1
0.0
100

Source: RHCT, Volkstelling 1810

years the labour division mirrored the situation characterizing the adult
labour market.
Apparently, a womans expected future was to be a housewife and
mother, even though that did not always occur in fact.63 In Tilburg, there
was a surplus of women, which naturally meant that many of them
remained unmarried, most of whom (93 per cent) worked. Many of them
found work as live-in servants, but a substantial number of unmarried
women headed their own households. Usually they worked in textile or
garment production, and occasionally as day labourers. We can indeed find
a few widows working in other crafts, or as farmers, merchants, or
innkeepers, but that was not the case for independent single women. The
segmentation of the labour market therefore weighed heaviest on them.
Although Tilburgs textile industry and economy experienced growth in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,64 the individual weaver
and spinner in general does not seem to have profited from it. This was
especially true for women, and most of all for single women. Whereas
there were opportunities for some men to become shearers or dyers, those
were core professions and equally inaccessible to single and married
women. Most people, men and women, had become wage-dependent over
the past centuries and only large textile entrepreneurs and some
independent weavers could profit from the declining influence of
merchants from Holland.
63. Hettie Pott-Buter, Facts and Fairy Tales about Female Labor, Family and Fertility: A SevenCountry Comparison, 18501990 (Amsterdam, 1993), p. 53, claims that the bourgeois
domesticity ideal was already firmly embedded in Dutch society in the seventeenth century.
Although it is debatable whether this applied to all classes alike, I myself find many direct and
indirect indications in the archival sources for contemporary consensus about the role of
women (working-class or otherwise). Although in practice many women had to work, raising
children and housekeeping were important arguments (for the Poor Relief authorities, for
instance) for relieving married and widowed women of the duty to work, whereas men and
young single women were expected to make a living by their own efforts.
64. Van Gurp, Brabantse stoffen op de wereldmarkt, pp. 198200.

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The growth of the proletariat also translated into an increased

proportion of men in peripheral jobs like spinning. Male weavers had lost
much of their independence, and their employers could decide to set them
to spinning too. Since men would rather be spinners than unemployed,
they were willing to perform such low-paid work. Textile entrepreneurs
thus solved the problem of the large demand for cheap labour, and in doing
so increased their power over the labour force so that they could exploit
the dual structure of the labour market. Womens labour market
opportunities were consequently limited even in their age-old trade of
spinning. Capitalism might have changed unequal power relations between the sexes, but it certainly did not eliminate them.65
MIGRANT WORKERS

To understand how the segmented labour market functioned in the preindustrial period it is useful to compare female with migrant workers. In
Leiden, many textile workers were migrants; but all the same, the dual
labour market theory is only partly valid for them, at least for most of the
seventeenth century. Lucassen and de Vries have shown that in that period
Leiden was the centre of a west European textile-worker-migration
system, in which highly skilled migrant workers were intentionally
recruited from textile-producing regions outside the Republic. These
immigrants, bringing with them specific weaving skills and specializations,
were then very welcome in Leiden, while its textile industry boomed
between 1580 and 1660,66 but even so, the textile occupations with the
highest status, such as finishing and shearing, were nearly always
performed by workers from within the Dutch Republic.67
Because of this selective immigration, relatively few low-skilled migrant
workers worked in the Leiden textile industry in the first half of the
seventeenth century. Elsewhere, Lucassen and de Vries have suggested that
low-skilled jobs were mostly done by women and children.68 The textileworker-migration system disappeared when the textile industry began its
decline. My assumption is that once that happened, first- and secondgeneration male immigrants were the first to go into lower-skilled trades,
replacing those women and children. There is some evidence for this, for
instance when we look at the membership lists for Leidens wool-combers
65. See also Hartmann, Capitalism, Patriarchy, p. 152.
66. Leo Lucassen and Boudien de Vries, The Rise and Fall of a West European Textile-Worker
Migration System: Leiden, 15861700, in Gerard Gayot and Philippe Midard (eds), Les
ouvriers qualifies de lindustrie (XVIeXXe sie`cle). Formation, employ, migration (Lille, 2001),
pp. 2442, 2830.
67. Ibid., p. 34.
68. Leo Lucassen and Boudien de Vries, Leiden als middelpunt van een Westeuropees textielmigratiesysteem, 15861650, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 22 (1996), pp. 138163, 160.

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

213

Table 7. Migrant and non-migrant workers in Tilburg, 1810

Men

All heads of households

(HH)
HH in industry
HH in textiles
HH spinning
HH weaving
HH high-skilled
(dyeing, finishing, etc.)

Women

Born in
Tilburg

Not born
in Tilburg

Born in
Tilburg

Not born
in Tilburg

72% (1,372)

28% (529)

73% (466)

27% (173)

79% (938)
86% (715)
86% (195)
93% (362)

21% (255)
14% (115)
14% (32)
7% (27)

70% (109)

30% (46)

77% (393) 23% (117)

79% (354) 21% (93)
80% (333) 20% (83)
Not
Not
significant significant
Not
Not
significant significant

guild, which contain remarkably many names of French men.69 The

waning of child labour towards the end of the seventeenth century could
also be ascribed to their replacement by migrant male workers.70
In Tilburg, there seem to have been only small differences in the
percentages of migrants in peripheral jobs. Contrary to what the dual
labour market theory predicts, the percentage of migrant workers seems to
be if anything slightly higher in jobs of higher status (see Table 7).
In the textile industry, where we should expect more migrants than in
other industries, the percentage of migrants is lower than it is in the whole
industrial sector. Within the textile industry, we find surprisingly fewer
migrants in spinning and weaving, which were lower-status jobs, and more
in dyeing and finishing, which bore a higher status. Since total immigration
figures were low in this period, we might conclude that only more highly
skilled migrants could manage to settle in Tilburg. This evidence on
Tilburg supports the findings for Leiden, where highly skilled migrant
workers were generally welcome, especially in economically favourable
periods.
CONCLUSIONS

It is clear that a segmented labour market existed in the pre-industrial

period. Even before the emergence of capitalism at the end of the sixteenth
century, there was a distinct gender division of labour according to core
and peripheral occupations, also at branch level. The core professions in
the textile industry comprised mostly guild-organized, highly skilled, and
69. RAL, SA II, Archief Gilden, inv. no. 1374/3; Register en alfabetische naamlijsten van
meester-wolkammers, 17001722.
70. Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie, vol. 2, p. 600.

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well-paid jobs done by men. In the periphery we find low-paid, lowstatus, and non-organized work, done mainly by women. Not only did
this dichotomy manifest itself within a particular branch, it is equally
visible between branches, and even between regions. In this geographical
division, Holland represented the core, where most highly skilled finishing
labour was done, while lower-skilled spinning and weaving was increasingly put out to peripheral areas like Tilburg.
However, the dual labour market was far from stable during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, influenced by economic
fluctuations, the division of labour between men and women was regularly
reordered. When the economic tide was favourable, as it was in Leiden for
most of the seventeenth century, the core was somewhat more accessible to
women; but when the economy declined, men tried to secure their own
employment to the disadvantage of migrants, but even more so of women.
For migrants, explicit regulations could be introduced, but mechanisms
against women in the labour market were usually more subtle, as men
utilized the existing patriarchal relationships embedded in society to
respond to economic changes. However, instead of what Honeyman and
Goodman predict, that process did not necessarily involve explicit gender
conflict or guild pressure.
Guilds did indeed form part of mens strategies of exclusion, but they
were by no means requisite for them. I have shown that guilds, rather than
creating the dual labour market, merely symbolized and then strengthened
it. After all, core trades that were not guild-regulated, like weaving in
Leiden and Tilburg, were also scarcely accessible to women. Official
regulations against women barely existed in fact, but as an unwritten rule
their exclusion was generally accepted I shall come back to this point.
For migrants, things were rather different, for rules explicitly excluding
them did exist more often than not, although if individuals having the right
skills also had enough money to buy themselves citizenship, they were
allowed to join the guild. So it seems that structural segmentation of the
labour market affected female workers much more than it did migrants, at
least in the early modern period.
Another means of securing mens position in core professions was the
possibility of them receiving formal training. I have shown that in Leiden
and Tilburg, both within and outside the guild system, women right from
the start of their work in the textile industry did not have the same access
to formal training as boys and men did. Obviously, skill is partly a
subjective criterion, for instance as measured by the number of years of
formal training, regardless of whether such a duration is actually needed to
learn the basics of a craft.
A third protective mechanism in times of economic change was the
creation of new hierarchies in the organization of labour. When men were
effectively forced on to the periphery by economic decline and by the rise

Women in the Dutch Textile Industry, 15811810

215

of capitalist relations, that circumstance obviously led to their proletarianization and with it the loss of independence and status. By defining their
own work in relation to womens work, some men nevertheless managed
to salvage their job status. In the Leiden cloth industry for example, only
men became master spinners, who were in effect subcontractors
between drapers and wage-earning spinners. It was a means by which
men tried to distinguish their work from womens, hoping to redefine it to
higher-status core jobs. A clear example of this was the proletarianization of weaving, which occurred both in Leiden and Tilburg. Although the
status of weaving declined in the context of the entire textile production
process, it was still protected against the encroachment of women, so in
relation to the work of women weaving remained more highly skilled and
better paid, and again relatively speaking a core profession.
The split labour market theory predicts that employers will use the
threat of cheap labour to undermine the position of better-paid workers.
In order to keep wages low, employers can make use of cheap labour,
confined to the peripheral professions. Womens work was often considered as additional to the family income although still necessary. Migrants
were in the position that on entering the labour market, they would take
on (however temporarily) almost any work for just about any wage.
Therefore both these groups were likely sources of cheap labour.71
Following this line of reasoning, it would be logical to suppose that in such
circumstances more women would enter the market as cheap labour, but I
have shown that things worked in precisely the opposite way. In fact,
when the economy declined, more men entered such peripheral occupations as combing and spinning. In some cases, they even competitively
displaced some women. Moreover, for women it became harder than ever
before to enter core professions.
Pure economic reasoning does not suffice to explain these developments. Rather, it seems appropriate to apply the institutional approach of
the dual labour market theory, which would see a counter-reaction in the
labour market by established groups (i.e. male burghers). To prevent
competition, men tried to protect certain parts of the labour market, by
simply excluding outsiders. The stability argument no doubt plays an
important role here: because men were considered to be breadwinners,
their work had to be stable and fairly well paid. Again, it is important to
emphasize the relationship with prevailing economic trends. When the
economy flourished, restrictions might have been loosened, but when the
economy declined, the reins were usually tightened. At such times
exclusive reactions against women became much more likely. It even
happened that previously female trades became guild-organized when men
entered them, as occurred around 1700 in the case of the Leiden wool71. Bonacich, Theory of Ethnic Antagonism, pp. 550551.

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combers guild. Many of these combers were second-generation male

migrants who, in preference to many of the women, were thought of as
breadwinners. That such a thing could happen without much conflict
might be explicable because the majority of women actually approved, for
although 10 to 20 per cent of them never married, their exclusion favoured
male and widowed female breadwinners.
The stability argument affected single women even more than it did
strangers. Whereas some migrants were wanted for their specific skills,
womens vocational training had usually been hampered ever since
adolescence, as the data on child labour in Leiden and Tilburg show.
Trades on the periphery were mostly low-skilled, although only relatively
so, and of low status, certainly hardly able to provide any chance of social
mobility. That was exactly the kind of work married women could leave
and return to after giving birth and then raising their infants, a task
practically confined to them. Because of it, they were considered too
unreliable a workforce for more highly skilled work.72 The stability
argument also explains why some widows did manage to enter jobs of
higher status. They were usually in a more stable stage of their life, often
being past childbearing age. That meant they could guarantee the
continuity of their labour. Although single women did not fit the pattern
described here, their job opportunities depended on the segmented labour
market founded upon these same ideals.
To conclude, labour-market segmentation in this period did not display
a static but rather a dynamic pattern. Depending on the economic
circumstances, accessibility to core and periphery occupations varied.
Furthermore, the esteem in which trades were held changed over time,
leading to different notions of job status, and then to different ideas of
what constituted core and periphery. Cities, employers, and ordinary
working men made use of patriarchal and capitalist relations, often
unintentionally, to regulate the labour market, especially when times were
hard. Their means of legitimization lay in their need to safeguard an ideal
of the male breadwinner. On the one hand, they could make sure that there
was enough stable, well-paid work for part of the workforce, preferably
male citizens, while, on the other hand, employers assured themselves of
sufficient cheap workers in labour-intensive industries where labour was a
large proportion of overhead costs. Women, not migrants, were the first to
feel the consequences of economic hardship. Gender antagonism then,
rather than class or ethnic differences, structured and reshaped the preindustrial labour market in times of economic change.

72. Wolf and Rosenfeld, Sex Structure of Occupations and Job Mobility, pp. 825 and 827.